WordPress Plugins In Use
Our entire SEO website uses WordPress as the online development platform. This list of plugins is presented to prove that you are actually looking at a website that is presenting WordPress more as a normal looking static webpage site than as as a dynamically created blog.
This page was created as a combination of a page, plugin, and page template. And, illustrates that plugin developers can come up with a variety of techniques to get their tasks done. In WordPress there is no such thing as a standard. And, certainly there is no WordPress enforcement of a community standard.
This page is where this SEO blog votes for and against WordPress Plugins. Many plugins are just plain quirky. In most cases, whether or not a plugin will work for you depends upon the version of WordPress currently in use by your blog along with your choice of theme and current crop of plugins. Bloggers positively should avoid any plugin that produces a nasty server error. And, some plugins are just plain anti-Google and should be avoided.
Plugins To Avoid at all Costs
- IMM-Glossary v2.1.1 by Internet Marketing Monitor - The IMM-Glossary plugin was supposed to create and manage an online glossary of terms. It turned out to be a poorly implemented nightmare of a Server Error generating, File Not found, Google disaster.
This plugin is so incompatible with so many other plugins that it just must be doing something fundamentally wrong to be producing so many server errors. Its entire URL approach was both horribly bad and totally stupid, IMHO. This plugin doesn't even produce a listing that looks like a standard WikiPedia glossary listing.
This plugin is a total waste of time. Does this plugin actually do anything? It will just waste your time. May have been once useful, but WordPress version 2.2 searches pages as well as posts by default.
This plugin positively does NOT search comments, nor exclude categories on my theme.
List of Recommended WordPress Plugins
Here's all 14 plugins that are currently activated on this site.
- AdvancedSearch Lite v0.1 by Alex Günsche — This one is the little brother of the popular Advanced Search from the same author. This plugin allows you to have a powerful site search for your WordPress installation. It uses MySQL’s advanced search functionalities. It also features multi-color search term highlighting.
Partially corrects the insanity of the standard WordPress search. It uses advanced MySQL complex search features that optionally allows your search returns to be based upon relevancy.
I have checked out their advanced package to see if I can make the search feature on this site even better. But, it does not work at all on my blog for some reason.
- Akismet v2.1.3 by Matt Mullenweg — Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.”
Akismet does an excellent job of catching spam. Why do these spammers persist when just about all WordPress blogs use this plugin?
- All in One SEO Pack v1.3.6.4 by uberdose — Out-of-the-box SEO for your Wordpress blog.
Puts page titles, descriptions, and keyword management all in a single plugin. Saves you the time of having to create custom fields in each of your pages and posts.
Do NOT be deluded into thinking that this plugin will solve all of your SEO problems.
WARNING: Watch out when you upgrade!!! This fool author will once again stick the blog title in every post and page despite your stated preferences. Why would any plugin developer save some of your options, but NOT all of them? How can any developer write a SEO plugin and not have a clue as to how duplicate content works in Google? WordPress developers are just a bunch of total nut jobs. IMHO. When a WordPress developer claims to have written a Google plugin, NEVER ever assume that they actually have a clue as to what they are doing. :(
This site also uses a robots.txt file and a theme Header template conditional tag hack. Some SEO issues have to be addressed at the theme level. So, either you have to be using a SEO theme or search engine optimize your current choice of theme.
- Custom Query String v2.7 by Matt Read — Change the number of posts displayed when viewing different archive pages.
- Dagon Design Sitemap Generator v3.07 by Aleister — Generates a fully customizable HTML sitemap is for the benefit of visitors to your site. I instruct Google to follow, but not index this sitemap.
Provides an important exclude feature.
- Genki Announcement v1.2 by Genkisan - i18n patched by Masayan — Displays a news announcement on your blog.
This plugin allows me to use javascript to encase my News Announcements so that they are invisible to the search engines while the announcement is being displayed.
Now, a maintainance announcement is posted while I am developing the blog online.
- Link to Me Textbox v1.0 by Jim Westergren — This plugin will set up a “link to me textbox” with HTML code in your blog posts and increase your search engine rankings.
Modified the wording to my liking. A good feature of this plugin is that the author does not plug his plugin on every post.
Buy yourself a beer, after linking to my blog.
- List Subpages v2.1 by Rob Miller — Adds a post tag that lists the sub pages of the current page, allowing you to use parent pages in a similar way to categories.
This plugin, along with the use of conditional PHP coding and a Go Back button in the sidebar, is how I achieved the variable page menu used on this WordPress blog.
- Search Excerpt v1.2 $Rev: 19 $ by Scott Yang — Modify
the_exceprt() template code during search to return snippets containing the search phrase. Snippet extraction code stolen from Drupal’s search module. And patched by Jam to support Asian text.
Partially corrects the insanity of the standard WordPress search. Along with the use of a Search Results template in the theme mimics both the looks and functionality of Google search results.
- Search Phrases v1.0 by flash — Displays last search phrases.
I use this to display what visitors referred from search engines are actually searching for in a private page.
- Similar Posts v2.1.1 beta by Rob Marsh, SJ — Displays a list of posts similar to the current one by comparing the way they use words. Instructions and help online.
- Smart Update Pinger v2.0 by Christian Davén —
Replaces the built-in ping/notify functionality. Pings only when publishing new posts, not when editing.
My observations on FREE WordPress blogs that use tags indicates that old edited posts are in fact pinged, even in latest user friendly version of WordPress. Why in the world, WordPress would ever think that this would be a good idea is totally beyond me.
It returns the results of each ping. Allowing you to better edit your list of pinging services
- Viper’s Plugins Used v1.12 by Viper007Bond — Allows you to display alphabetically what plugins you have enabled on your blog in either a table or unordered list. Also allows you to set custom descriptions for the plugins in the output.
This is the hack of a plugin that I use to create this page with. Provides yet another opportunity for bloggers to comment.
WARNING: Using this plugin forces you to maintain all the URLs in your plugins, in order to avoid 404 Not Founds and 301 Redirection problems with Google.
- WP-ContactForm v2.0.7 by Douglas Karr — WP Contact Form is a drop in form for users to contact you. It can be implemented on a page or a post. It currently works with WordPress 2.0+. The plugin was originally developed by Ryan Duff but has been modified by Doug Karr to require a challenge question and response to fight spam as well as some other features.
The only form that my website needs is an email contact form. This plugin gets the job done in a small package. Requires only a few minutes to install.